Channel bonding involves multiple physical connections which are bonded into a single logical connection. Channel bonding is a method where the data in each message gets striped across multiple network cards installed in each machine. In a particular method, channel bonding doubles the communication rate while only adding about ten percent to the overall cost. One way to perform channel bonding is to use multiple transceivers working in parallel. For example, data words in a transmitter can be split into bytes, with each byte sent over a separate transceiver. The bytes are received in parallel by separate transceivers in a receiver. The received bytes are then combined in the correct sequence to recover the original words. The communication path of each transceiver pair (one in the transmitter and one in the receiver) is called a “channel”. These methods depend on parallel communication channels to achieve adequate sustained message transfer rates.